Every new Pixar film bears the weight of great expectations. In the context of classics such as "Finding Nemo," "WALL-E" and this year's
"Inside Out," "The Good Dinosaur" is a mild disappointment. It's a heartwarmer, no doubt, and an exemplary display of animation-as-art. But the story works in service of the visuals, when the opposite should be true.
The film is conceptually clever: it's set in a prehistoric Earth era, on an alternate timeline where the asteroid that caused the dinosaurs' extinction was a near miss instead of a direct hit. In the wake of the non-event, evolution directed life into different biological avenues, and director/co-writer Peter Sohn uses the concept as an implied explanation for the development of language and intelligence in dinosaurs – as well as the co-existence of the giant lizards with human forms.
So, in Sohn's world, herbivorous dinosaurs work the land on farms, and carnivores drive cattle across the planes. The protagonist, Arlo (voice of Raymond Ochoa), is the former, an apatosaur cultivating corn with his family: Poppa (Jeffrey Wright), Momma (Frances McDormand), and siblings Buck (Marcus Scribner) and Libby (Maleah Nipay-Padilla). Arlo is the runt, all gangly limbs and awkwardly oversized feet. He's afraid of the farm's chickens, understandably so, because they're comically ugly. (Although why a family of plant-eaters needs chickens remains unexplained.)
The farm's corn silo is regularly raided by, as Poppa calls it, a "wilderness critter." It's a feral human boy, mostly running around on all fours, howling at the moon, panting and sniffing things. Yes, like a dog. Arlo will eventually name him Spot (Jack Bright), and later will learn, although the boy's language is primitive at best, his brain has evolved enough to comprehend symbolism. But first, Arlo attempts to trap the boy, and what with one thing and another, is knocked unconscious and washed far downriver, and must summon the uncharacteristic courage and strength to find his way back home.
The boilerplate journey narrative allows Sohn to indulge a remarkably photo-realistic visual palette. The one exception is Arlo and his kin, textured like rubber bendy toys. The young dino travels through gorgeous travelogue-worthy landscapes – pine forests, cloud-capped mountaintops, burnt orange desert plains. A swoosh of a tail in a field sends up a flurry of fireflies, their lights merging with the bounty of stars in the sky. A fearsome lightning storm ravages the forest, scorching the earth and bleaching it white. A river shimmers like glass when it's calm; a dry canyon quickly becomes the path for a raging flash flood. The imagery is a reminder of the great beauty and danger of the natural world, which can dwarf even the most towering beast.
Arlo forges an unusual friendship with Spot, and they help each other through a series of episodic events held loosely together by the overarching adventure. Some episodes are better than others: an uproarious encounter with an eccentric, cross-eyed Styracosaurus, his crown of horns adorned with a variety of bizarre creatures. Spot teaches him to puff air into the dens of prairie dog-like mammals, and watch the fluffy animals pop out the holes. They unwittingly munch on fermenting fruit, experience weird hallucinations and wake up with headaches.
Other encounters are less whimsical, more commonplace. The duo comes across three T-rexes with stereotypical yee-haw Texas accents – one voiced with the booming twang of Sam Elliott – who are more wearisome than endearing. A group of Pterodactyls provide swooping predatory terror, led by Thunderclap (Steve Zahn), who speaks in the fanatical tones of a crazed cult leader.
It's a cliché to say every shot is a work of art, but here, it's absolutely true. Each frame is rendered with masterful visual strokes. The eye candy quickly overshadows the film's conceptual novelty and familiar theme; the idea that you must face and accept your fears in order to overcome them is barely worthy of Pixar's Big Book of Philosophies. But one of the reasons we trek to movie theaters is to see something wondrous on the big screen, and
"The Good Dinosaur" offers a marvelous and immersive world. Every time I proclaim an animation as beautiful as it can possibly get, another one comes along and makes the statement false, and this is one of those films. Just don't see it in 3-D, which significantly dims its vibrancy. You wouldn't wear sunglasses into a museum, would you?
http://www.mlive.com/movies/index.ssf/2015/11/the_good_dinosaur_review_new_p.html
Thanks to John Serba
